How do I copy the entire contents of boot drive?

Why not image your C: partition, but ignore the small system partition? Then restore that image to the partition holding your newly installed Windows system, overwriting it.

The new system partition will remain in place and not be touched by the image restore. You'll probably end up with a non-booting system again, but circumstances will be completely different and you have a much better chance of successfully using the Startup Repair.

Basically it'll just be a matter of "re-detecting" the Windows system and creating a new boot entry for it.

(I actually used precisely this same method - successfully - to manually align my system partition when I was cloning it from HDD to a new SSD.)

Corazon said:

Why not image your C: partition, but ignore the small system partition? Then restore that image to the partition holding your newly installed Windows system, overwriting it.

The new system partition will remain in place and not be touched by the image restore. You'll probably end up with a non-booting system again, but circumstances will be completely different and you have a much better chance of successfully using the Startup Repair.

Basically it'll just be a matter of "re-detecting" the Windows system and creating a new boot entry for it.

(I actually used precisely this same method - successfully - to manually align my system partition when I was cloning it from HDD to a new SSD.)

I am up for this. What software do you recommend for imaging the old C drive? The software I used before grabbed the entire drive including the unwanted partition.

Once I get this up and running on my "new" c drive, I will then be restoring it to my old physical C drive which is a SSD. What a pain in the butt this has been and I am not even through. I am not opposed to buying software to make the move as I will need to do this twice to get it back on the SSD.

Paul

The free edition of Macrium Reflect is a favorite around here, and definitely won't backup or restore any other partitions besides what you tell it to. It'll do the job very nicely.

Macrium Reflect FREE Edition - Information and download

Downloaded and made the image last night. Will try the restore after work today. Thanks for your help.

Paul

You're very welcome. Please keep us posted on your progress; if any new issues crop up we'll be glad to help you along. :)

I got home too late last night to work on my project, so I started tonight.

As mentioned before, I did a fresh installation of Win7x64 on a hard drive. It booted fine. I used reflect to take my crapped out Win7x64 installation onto the bootable fresh installation. In the advanced options in reflect, I opted NOT to replace the MBR as I knew the MBR was bad on the crapped out Win7x64 installation. It wouldn't boot, but I was expecting this.

I entered the windows recovery environment, opened a DOS window and went to c:\boot and renamed the BCR to BCR.old, ran Bootrec /rebuildBCD

Crossed my fingers and it now gives me an error saying that pwnative is missing, skipping and autocheck is missing, skipping then it bluescreens and reboots.

Any suggestions? I am at a loss as to where to go now.

If the machine boots on a fresh copy of Win7, is it possible to simply copy over all the system files/folders, etc from the non-booting drive? I have a second machine to do this on, so I am not trying to do this on the non-booting box.


Any help is appreciated, and I will reward anyone who is able to help me resolve this issue.

Paul

Hmm. You should probably simply have run the automatic startup repair 3 times before just rebuilding the BCD store. That may well have broken things, not fixed them.

Just to avoid any misunderstandings: you have only one harddisk (the new one) in the computer, correct? Or did you add the new disk to the existing one and both are in the computer now?